The Indians were, it will be seen, entirely deprived of liberty. They were not allowed to do anything of their own motion. They could engage in no private pursuits, and there was, therefore, wanting every stimulus to individual elevation. A dead level was created, above which none rose save by grace and selection of the priests themselves. But in return for their confiscated freedom of action, the Indians were relieved of all care for the morrow; and otherwise the Jesuit Fathers, it must be confessed, were at pains to make despotism sweet and not bitter. The labour tasks imposed were in no sort onerous, and, as Azara remarks, they were amused “by a great number of balls, fêtes, and tournaments,” on which occasions the actors were invariably clothed in the most costly and magnificent vestments to be had in Europe. To the aspiring, cultured, exalted spirit slavery in a gilded cage would be simply intolerable; but in the case of the Guarani Indians it was very different. They were slaves, and they were perfectly contented with their slavery.
The Fathers were very careful to prevent their neophytes from acquiring the Spanish language; only a few, who occupied certain subordinate offices, were trusted with this knowledge, for the Fathers were well aware that the only basis on which their system could possibly rest secure was that of universal ignorance. Every channel of information or of communication was in consequence rigorously closed and barricaded by the institution of the most exclusive regulations. Education was summed up in the oral teaching (they were not taught to read or write) of certain church prayers and the ten commandments; and the time not monopolised by labour, or in the childish games provided for their relaxation, was devoted to exercises of piety and worship according to the pompous ritual of the Romish Church.
When, therefore, for reasons and under circumstances which I will not now stay to particularise, the Jesuits were expelled from the River Plate, and were compelled to abandon their missions, the pretentious fabric they had raised, possessing in itself no sustaining power, collapsed almost immediately. The withdrawal of the Fathers was an inexorable call to their former disciples to self-thought and self-action. They were, however, unequal to the demands of the situation; everything fell into disorder, and “villages in ruins, fields untilled, yerbales destroyed, at once demonstrate the grandeur and the fragility of the work undertaken by the learned ambition of the Jesuits.” But the labours of the Fathers were far from fruitless. They had sedulously cultivated amongst the Guarani populations of Paraguay sentiments of obedience and fanaticism, and, incapable of managing their own affairs, they have always reposed their destinies in the hands of some authority, invested with the power, as with the title, of El Supremo.
The history of this people, since the expulsion of the Jesuits, is, therefore, that of a succession of tyrannies. When all the neighbouring countries were engaged in a bloody war for the attainment of their independence no throb for liberty disturbed the popular heart of Paraguay. The Metropolitan supremacy was exposed to no tumultuous assault, and was subverted only when its official guardians betrayed their trust. The nation allowed itself to pass from one master to another, just like a herd of cattle, without protest and without the manifestation of any special interest, but to the new authority as to the old they rendered the same homage of unreasoning and unreflecting obedience. It is true that some forms of popular ratification were given, but only given because they were asked.
I cannot pause to specify the intrigues which resulted in placing Francia in the seat of power. Suffice it to say that in 1817 this terrible man caused himself to be proclaimed Supreme and Perpetual Dictator, and never surely did tyrant exercise absolute rule with a more ruthless and cruel rigour. Even the humblest ceased to find safety in their obscurity. For the most trifling reasons men and women were thrown into prisons and there tortured often to the death. Espionage was general; mutual confidence was destroyed; the members of society “moved as in a desert,” scarcely daring to address their dearest friends lest some thoughtless word might be reported to their detriment.
Francia lived in the most complete seclusion:—
He was as unapproachable as a divinity. Hidden in the recesses of his palace, nobody could penetrate to his presence. He only went out in the evening, and his progress was marked by a solitude. At the moment he quitted his palace the clock of the Cathedral sounded, and all the inhabitants, seized with affright, hastily retreated within doors. If one of them, by chance too late, was encountered by the cortège of the Dictator, he cast himself upon his knees, with his face to the earth, never daring to contemplate the features of El Supremo, and awaiting the chastisement he had incurred in an agony of fear. Sometimes he was carried to prison; more frequently he was let off with a few blows with the flat of a sabre, heartily applied by the soldiers of the escort.
Under such a Government neither agricultural nor trading industry could do other than languish, and the country was cut off from all commercial communication with the outer world.
The following extract will show how the Dictator was in the habit of accomplishing his ends:—
Only a few stuffs and clumsy implements were with difficulty produced in the country. But, in times of urgent necessity, the Dictator knew how to improvise workmen and teach them those arts of which they were ignorant. The means he employed are worthy of notice. He required belts for his soldiers: no one could make them. “Having prepared a gallows, he threatened to hang thereon a shoemaker who had failed to fashion the belts according to his desire.” By this process blacksmiths were converted into locksmiths, armourers, and cutlers, shoemakers into saddlers, goldsmiths into founders, and masons into architects. That their zeal might not be permitted to cool, he condemned a blacksmith to penal servitude who had badly constructed the sight-piece of a cannon. Everything was done by rule. The citizens were divested of all power of initiation. If they became proprietors, even their goods were subject to the arbitrary caprices of the Dictator. Under pretext of embellishing the capital, Francia “pulled down several hundred houses without compensating the owners, or troubling himself as to their fate or that of their families. Each was compelled to demolish his own house, and if he lacked the means, convicts were employed to do the work, and afterwards carried away what they thought proper.”